December 2008 – woowoowoo

seams I’ve been let down

Three flat tyres in the last month! You start to curse people who leave broken glass on the road. Since I started spending a bit more on my tyres, the problem has almost vanished – in fact, apart from the most recent three, I think I’ve only had two others in the past year, so it’s really not a major problem.

However, am I blaming the wrong people? I don’t keep records of this stuff, but at least three of my punctures in 2008 were not due to something sharp, but were the seams of the tube splitting. The last one was particularly annoying – an otherwise pristine BBB tube – only a few months old. I’m a bit more forgiving when a well patched old warrior gives way at the stitching, but this one had no excuses.

I don’t pump my tyres ridiculously hard or do anything else that might aggravate the problem – Is it just me, or are others finding the quality of tubes becoming an issue?

never buy lexmark again – ever!

My advice to anyone considering a new printer. Choose a Canon, or an HP, or a Fuji Xerox – anything except a Lexmark!

About 12 months ago, I bought a new colour laser printer, a Lexmark C500n, having had a gutfull of expensive inkjets with drivers that don’t get updated. I wanted to get a postscript mono printer, but family pressures for colour, and what seemed like an excellent deal from Lexmark, swayed me.

Since Leopard (OSX 10.5) was installed on a laptop at home, however, we’ve been having trouble. Investigations led me to realise that the driver is not compatible with Leopard, so I asked Lexmark for an update on when we might see a compatible driver. I got this response:

Thank you for contacting Lexmark Email Support.

In reply to your email, I am sorry to say but Lexmark C500n is a host based printer. Unfortunately, Lexmark has no plans to develop the Mac compatible driver for this printer. You can use Mac 10.4 compatible driver to run this printer on Mac Leopard. However, if it does not work then there is no other driver available to install this printer. I apologize for the inconvenience cuased to you in this regard.

Inconvenience!?! The printer cost me $400 and I’ve spent about $300 on toner… that’s quite an inconvenience, and a copy and paste apology just isn’t goint to cut it! Especially when you can still go to the Lexmark website to research the printer with the accompanying details: “Apple Macintosh Operating Systems Supported Apple Mac OS X Apple Mac OS 9.x”. Funny, I’d swear I’m using Mac OSX! This is plain old lying.

They seem to have found the resources to write a Vista driver, are there any windows users out there who want to buy a barely used printer?

there is sanity after all…

It’s quite natural to find stories/jokes/etc. about your own profession amusing. Those engaged in law enforcement all have their favourite cop show. Teachers just love Teachers and the priceless Gormsby. I got plenty of laughs out The IT Crowd.

In true IT fashion though, my favourite piece of work that really tells my life like it is, is a blog.
Tales from Redesignland is just brilliant, and although the author claims to be from a university in California, I am sure they have a secret webcam trained on my desk to capture all the insanity that goes on there.

This latest episode is just too much. I’m starting to get paranoid.